Chapter 11: Crossing the Line / Ecuador

By Paul Fast

It’s early May many years ago, and my father and I are in an alleyway, knocking on the back door of any restaurants we can find. My nine-year-old hands are clutching a pair of whole, frozen chickens – my father has another half dozen in a cardboard box. The rest of the family is waiting in the back of the Mitsubishi van down the street while we complete our clandestine mission. My parents (I will call them equally culpable here) have attempted a border run into Germany to stock up on groceries, which are much cheaper than Switzerland, where we have been living for the past several months. Meat, poultry in particular, is much more economical in Germany and we had loaded up. The border guard didn’t seem as excited as my parents over this cheap bounty, and in very Swiss diction pointed out the law that clearly states we have significantly surpassed the allowable limits on meat. Which brings us to the alleyway, where my father and I are trying to sell frozen chickens to any chef that might be willing to take them in order to mitigate our losses.

We are pulling into a gas station in Ecuador, trying to find a safe place to sleep for the night, and these are the memories going through my head. I have an entire childhood’s worth of them. Stories of adventures gone right and sometimes wrong, of my parents uprooting our entire family to show them a different part of the world. Who pulls 6 kids (at the time) out of school and decides to move to Europe for 6 months anyway? This is a question I have pondered many times as we contemplated our own journey across the Americas. Is this a responsible thing to do? Is it worth the investment? Will we even make it a whole year?

I’m scoping out the gas station, trying to determine the safest spot away from prying eyes to park for the night, trying to get a gut feel for the place. We fill up on gas, and I talk to the attendant, who assures me he will be on duty all night. I pull a cold cerveza from the fridge and offer it to him, hoping that my meager offering will convince him to stay a little more vigilant during the dark hours. It is in these moments that I remember the frozen chickens. I bet you my Dad was asking himself the same questions I thought. The adventures of my childhood, at the hands of a couple of courageous, fearless parents had built in me an unflagging optimism that things were going to work out. We would make it through the night ok, and who knows, we might actually make it to Ushuaia.

Ecuador is conveniently divided up into equal parts jungle, mountains, and coast. Our path into Ecuador follows a lesser-known highway into Amazonas region. As we penetrate deeper into the jungle, the pavement grows narrower and the vegetation presses in from the sides, slowly absorbing us the way a python squeezes its meal through its muscular length. Like the python, the jungle has little structure, it is an amorphous, boneless organism that slowly swells to fit whatever container or perimeter it is given. As the road hacks its way through the dense growth, we pass signs erected by the oil and gas companies that promise a bright future of prosperity and jobs. The promises were written over beautiful backdrops of unspoiled jungle, with a toucan painted jauntily above the corporate logo. The toucan was strategically positioned, as if he had been paid to tell you that it was all going to work out fine. Our destination was a jungle lodge in the heart of the Cuyabeno Reserve, one of the places that had been wrestled from the clutches of the oil barons.

The way into Cuyabeno is via dugout canoe on the river system. In fact, the only way to navigate the jungle is via the rivers that slink through the lower levels of this topographically featureless place. We are told by our guide that if you lose your proximity to the river, there is very little hope of finding your way out. The trees form a thick canopy of our heads, stitched together with liana vines and our canoe is slowly squeezed through the throat of the jungle itself.

Our lodging in Cuyabeno is timber framed rooms stilted up off the ground, enclosed with mosquito screens. It is arguable whether there are more living things inside our room our outside, and we intentionally keep the lights off when it is dark to avoid having to look at the moving, crawling surface that is our ceiling. Even less comforting is the large tarantula spider that our guide enthusiastically points out in the bathroom. Over the next several days we are escorted along trails, paddled quietly along secondary waterways, and taught about the immense cacophony of life that is the Amazon. Rare pink dolphins sliding through the tea-coloured water, monkeys of all shapes and sizes, caiman feeding on the kitchen scraps behind the dining area, snakes festooning tree branches like Christmas garlands, and more birds than you could ever imagine. Our highlight each evening was the gathering of all the boats on the small lake in front of our lodge, which was the only place you could swim in the jungle. Watched over by the giant, amber orb that slowly sank out of our sight, we laughed, dove and swam through the black water. Goodness knows what was swimming with us.

At nighttime the jungle roars at you. We are treated to a nighttime tour, and when the flashlights are turned on they carve a space out of the darkness that is lit with a thousand glowing eyes. That there could be this much life in one small space is simply overwhelming. In the middle of our nighttime walk, Fabricio (our tour guide) stopped in the middle of the trail. There, in the middle of the jungle, with nothing to announce it’s presence, is a moss draped concrete pedestal with a bronze plaque and circular ball on it’s top. Here, miles from nowhere and completely unexpected was the equator. We had reached the midpoint of the earth. The rest of our group seemed generally unimpressed, but I had imagined this moment a hundred times before. In our goal to cross the geographic immensity of an entire globe, the halfway mark was a big deal. We grinned madly and posed for pictures, lit by the glow of a dozen flashlights that shared this moment with us. Later in Ecuador we would visit the official monument, where we would learn about the significance of the line that divides north from south, but it was here, in the small corner of an immense space, that we that we found our toehold in the circumference of the world.

From the jungle, we pointed our way back to the Andes, slowly winding our way through the hairpins to win back the elevation we had lost to the Amazon. In Otovalo we visited the largest Indigenous market in South America, where we threaded our way through a thousand different vendors and spent a small fortune on colourful alpaca wool products. It was at our campground that we received some frightening news from friends of ours that we had met in Panama. They had been attacked by armed men at nighttime while wild camped at a lake not far away from us. Due to quick thinking, preparation, and the courageous application of liberal amounts of pepper spray they had been able to escape, largely unharmed. We had heard these sorts of stories before, but when they arrived at our camp the next night and we heard it from them first-hand, it left a deeper impression.

We had noticed a subtle shift in our human environment as we entered deeper into Ecuador. Perhaps it was the over friendliness of the Colombians, but there were less waves, less smiles and a harder edge to faces of those we encountered on the streets and in the markets. Ecuador has experienced significantly less tourism than Colombia, and is not as well known. National elections were coming up, and there was a tension in the air (after our departure from Ecuador, one of the presidential candidates was shot and killed leaving a campaign rally, pitching the country into nationwide chaos and lockdowns). The little infrastructure for overlanding that we had found in Colombia completely disappeared once we crossed the border. Our digital maps started to resemble those of earlier explorers, defined by critical logistical goals and objectives – where to find fresh water, where you could find a gas station with American propane bottle adaptors, or where someone was willing to let travelers find safe harbour in their parking lot for the night. The traveling was getting harder, and we found ourselves slipping more and more into a defensive posture. When we did camp wild, we did so with the jacks up and the nose of the truck pointed at the nearest escape route. Our pepper spray canisters were unearthed and kept close at hands. We double checked locks and valuables constantly.

From Otovalo we drifted south, finding our way to Cotopaxi, one of Ecuador’s iconic volcanoes. With summits reaching 5,800m plus, both Cotopaxi and Chimborazo will get you closer to the moon than any other point on earth, given their location directly along the earth’s midpoint. This was our second battle with altitude and our GPS slowly reeled off the vertical meters. As our Duramax clawed its way up the side of the mountain, it was complaining too. Our injectors weren’t getting enough oxygen to mix with the diesel, and it was coughing black smoke and responding sluggishly. At 4,580m, we parked it (facing downhill in case it didn’t want to start again) and continued on foot. Our goal was the toe of the glacier that crowns Cotopaxi’s well-appointed summit. We had been feeding ourselves acetazolamide in the previous days to try and counteract the effects of the altitude, but we still struggled. At 4,845m and in a whiteout hailstorm we reached the Refugio, where we nursed our headaches and stomachs with hot coca tea, and had our passports stamped (who knew!).

The way up from here was less clear, and as we climbed further, our little troupe of adventurers began to succumb to the frustration of poorly defined trails, scree slopes and legs that just didn’t seem to work the way we were used to. We wove our way back and forth in a semi-comatose state for several hours. Finally, at an elevation of 5,200m all five of us leaned forward and laid our hands on the blue ice of the mountains ice cap. Then we collapsed onto the red earth, utterly spent. I have walked many miles over many mountains back home, but this battle was entirely different and had been rigged from the start.

As we descended, the sun cleared out the remaining clouds and we were treated with a sight that we will never forget. There, beneath us was the entirety of the Andean escarpment, rolled out in front of us. We could see everything. It was place of perspective, a place from which you could see the very curve of the horizon itself. Chimborazo nodded to us in the distance. This was the very place where Alexander von Humboldt had visited early in his travels, and where he had formulated his theories about the interconnectedness of the natural world. A world composed not as a series of discrete, siloed natural orders, but something organic and living, indelibly woven together and interdependent. These theories would go on to form the basis of today’s understanding of ecology, as well as the foundation of the world’s first environmental movements. It is this sort of perspective that can be gained from climbing the high places of the earth, and we felt a small part of that as we clung to the side of this magnificent place.

The next day we find a small dirt track and explore the base of Cotopaxi, a wild place that doesn’t see many people. The flanks of the volcano are covered in wild horse herds, alpacas, strange grasses and flowers and hidden thermal sources. We find a lonely lake and pitched up next to it. The older boys (Papa may have been involved) convince Elias to skinny dip in its depths. We lit our first campfire in a long time and roasted our lunch in the shadow of the volcano. This was our first proper mountain of the trip, and as I sat there by the embers of a dying fire, the boys horsing around with slingshots, this mountain boy felt for the first time a tinge of homesickness.

It is Nathaniel’s birthday this week, so we head to Quito, the big city, for a day of big city things. We rid ourselves of some pent-up family frustration with a round of paintball, dig up a basketball court, get Nathaniel his haircut and then search out a Pizza Hut and a hotel with a pool for the night. The big cities have not been easy for us to navigate on this trip. They are impossible to find parking in for our big rig, and generally carry a higher level of theft and safety issues than rural areas. So, while there are certainly more culturally rich ways to see these cities, for us they have become a place to swap our camper for a hotel room and enjoy some creature comforts. Its a place where we can all breathe a sigh of relief and rest up a little from road life. These luxuries are partially offset in our travel budget by the lowest fuel prices we have encountered on our entire trip yet - $.60 Canadian cents a litre!

Our next stop in Ecuador is a small town called Banos, that perches midway down the Andean slope as it slides back towards the Amazon. In this small town we find a beautiful little grassy campground on the banks of the Rio Verde. The next day, we rent mountain bikes and set off for a one-way trip down the highway that tracks through the bottom of the Valley of a Thousand Waterfalls. We share the road with other vehicles headed downhill, and I died a thousand deaths inside watching Elias wobbling back and forth on the margins of the asphalt, balanced precariously between semis loaded with sugar cane and thousand foot drops.

To ensure that Papa had received the maximum adrenaline for the day, we stop and ride a gondola across the river’s gorge. The term gondola is used generously here. What we rode in was a rusty cage welded together from bits of left over chicken wire trundling along a worn steel cable, pulled by a 40 year old Cummins diesel engine that had been stripped out of an old truck. It was cheap though! The path down the valley concludes with a waterfall at which you could climb through a rock tunnel to actually get behind the curtain of water. We catch a ride back to the camper in the back of a truck, the boys grinning as they wave at the drivers behind us.

These are the days that we live for, unexpected treasures and experiences discovered along the side of a road slightly less traveled, grinning faces and tired legs, and a bag full of memories that will accompany us in the years to come.

The road south to the Peruvian border leads through the town of Cuenca, and the Duramax settles it’s nose between the yellow lines of some good pavement and starts eating up the miles. Our progress comes to a quick halt when we hit a desvio (detour). The PanAm Highway had been taken out by massive landslide. As with many of our detours, it started out optimistically. Soon however, good signs gave way to spraypainted arrows scrawled on tree trunks, and pavement gives way to dirt. Our desvio winds it’s way high into the Andean uplands. Here, facing into the bitter winds that sweep the land, the Ecuadorian farmers scratch out a living. Both women and men work the fields here, wrapped in colourful wool that introduces flashes of colour to an otherwise dull landscape. Much of Ecuador is Indigenous, in stark contrast to Colombia, where most have been eradicated or expelled during colonization. Short and stocky, they dress in rich, colourful clothing and tall felt hats.

I had hoped that the richness in clothing materials and texture would extend to their buildings, but the opposite is true. The buildings are ugly, low slung lumps cast on the landscape, their grey shoulders hunched into the wind. They have nothing of the earthy charm we had seen in Colombia. Generally made of concrete frames with brick infill walls, every building follows the same pattern, determined by a ruthless obedience to the same, repeating module (likely set by the distance concrete within a certain form depth could span from column to column). Unadorned, uncoated and in a perpetual state of evolution these structures lack any sense of purpose or orientation to the land. They are shelter, reduced to its crudest denominator. To make matters worse, someone had found some blue tinted reflective window glass on sale somewhere and now the only hint of colour beyond the people, are the blue, lidless eyes that stare out over a grey land.

After several hours and few nervous moments watching the needle of our fuel tank hit the bottom, the desvio finally deposited us back on the PanAm. We feel as though our detour has allowed us to slip behind the curtain of the PanAm, and peer for a moment or two into the heart of Ecuador. Here we had seen the hardness of a land that demanded much of the people who called it home. Life here was found not in the beauty of mountains and valleys, but the people that painted them with dots of colour. We had tried to peer a little deeper past this curtain, but something had stopped us. While we were always treated politely, we never really found our way past the surface in this land, we were always kept at a respectful distance. Perhaps by nature of our travel, or our pace, we would leave Ecuador with a niggling feeling like we hadn’t quite gotten a hold of it. We would leave feeling like the thing we were supposed to see or experience to that would really unlock this place was just around the next corner. That corner however, is for another time. Peru is waiting.